Okay, keep in mind the world stage at the time. It's just a few years after the OPEC oil embargo. Massive political upheaval all over the world, tensions between nations, overall nasty business. And that's just the Middle East, which is what we're talking about now.

Let's say you have a major oil-producing country, let's call that country Iran. Now, imagine that this country, a year earlier, just suffered a massive cultural revolution following a political coup in which the pro-western leader was ousted and forced to flee the country, replaced by an extremely conservative theocrat who isn't particularly fond of the west on his best days. Now, this conservative theocrat is not particularly well loved by his people, and widespread protests take place, cutting production even more.

Adding to that, let's take another major oil producing country nearby, we'll call it Iraq. Things are kind of tense here, because Iraq would love to dominate the region the way Iran currently does, but they're also a little worried about Iran's new regime, and also about people in their own country who might be getting ideas about rebelling. And let's say those two countries go to war after nearly a year of border skirmishes and cut their production and exports heavily.

On top of this, you have OPEC, the same conglomerate of oil exporting countries that just screwed everybody a few years back. They look at this situation and say "This is good news for us!", because even though Iran and Iraq were both members and so overall production was down, everybody else was able to increase the price on their oil, citing the ongoing problems in those countries decreasing the available supply while demand was ever increasing.

Now, let's say you have a third country. This country also produces and exports oil, while simultaneously importing tons of it. We'll call this third country America. Now, America didn't have a great time during OPEC's embargo a few years back, and the cost of oil and other energy sources was a major political talking point. One party had the idea that the government nationalize the American oil industry to protect consumers, another party wanted total deregulation of the commodity. And then all that other stuff happened right around the time that the sitting president at the time was implementing a slow approach toward deregulation while trying to encourage his people to get through the crisis by using less oil and gas whenever and wherever possible.

Now, it's important to remember that Iran and Iraq didn't export that much oil, and the other OPEC nations were doing a pretty good job picking up the slack. Most estimates I've seen put the overall drop in world oil production at 4% at its highest point. But that was more than enough to frighten people into thinking there wouldn't be enough for everybody. To finally get around to answering your question, fear was what drove the price up so high. Fear that there wouldn't be enough, fear that somebody else would get there first and there wouldn't be any left for you. Fear that the governments were stockpiling oil and gas for their own purposes and would let the populace go without. Fear that you couldn't go on living your life the way you'd become accustomed to. People were quite literally stabbing each other to get ahead in line at the gas station just so they could fill up a little sooner, because they were afraid to stand in line and risk not getting any.